Vassal
by colorfulreverie
Summary: The Shinigami King conscripts Light Yagami's older sister to counteract Ryuk's grand scheme. And, so, much like with L and Kira, a battle of wits ensues between the mightiest and the most cunning of the Shinigami. I wrote this in order to satiate my own curiosity about the Shinigami in the Death Notice Universe. I own nothing but my OCs. Eventual LxOC.
1. Foolery and Irony

The Shinigami King was not fooled easily.

In the past, he regarded a Death Note falling into the Human World as a _reprieve_, a chance for him and his subjects to kick back their feet, or other forms of appendages, with a bushel of apples in the same way humans might sit back with a bucket of popcorn for an anticipated movie. Such an occasion was a chance to take a break from their relentless work and enjoy the momentous ripple effect that a Death Note always has in the hands of a human.

Humans. Such _pathetic_ creatures.

Like chickens in a coup. Like pigs in a slaughter house. Humans could let them roam free and make a sport of hunting them down for sustenance, and certainly that's how things used to be. But, in the current age, it was so much easier to let them live blissfully ignorant in a gilded prison, without want for food or drink or company or mates, until they were ripe for death.

_Death_. Right. That was the point of it all. His brethren didn't know why they exist, and for a while they constantly pestered him with questions about the point of their existence when, if left in peace, humans would die anyway. They asked him question as, ironically, humans have asked their leaders and sometimes deities the very same question: _Why am I here?_

Eventually, they stopped asking and accepted that they just _were_. As palpable as their curiosity was, the fear of the Unknown, the fear of what would happen to them if they essentially starved themselves and stopped taking human lives, always won out.

And, so, like diligent but weary students, they pressed their pens to the paper of their Death Notes, and meticulously continued to paint the names of their victims. And, they continued to _be_, safe from that Unknown, willing to accept their task or fate or whatever it was without question.

However, Ryuk was different. He always was.

The Shinigami King let out an exasperated sigh as he roiled around like a huge, dark thundercloud. He was what a human might call a nightmare to behold. His head was a bone human-like skull with two bright, red eyes, the legacy of the Shinigami race. His head was encompassed by another skull, which served as a kind of cowl. This cowl was almost alien with elongated human-like features. The rest of his body was a mass of dark cloud. Four abnormally long arms extended from his body, and, instead of fingers, each arm sported three claws. His body also had chains, which moved in accordance to his will. They were thick, black chains, which now clung to the various pillars around him as if they were holding him aloft.

He lived on the highest peak in the Shinigami Realm, his "Olympus" as he privately thought of it. On top of this peak was a circular and open pavilion. The pavilion was ringed by crumbling marble columns, decayed by time and wrapped in dead, brown vines. The floor of the pavilion was smooth but for an ever-present thin layer of sand. Embedded in the middle of the floor was his own personal portal into the Human World.

He glared into the portal now, watching Ryuk merrily stalk his new human as the human walked home from school. He was young man, fair for one of his kind, with honey brown hair that brushed his intelligent eyes. With his own Shinigami Eyes, the king could see the names and remaining life span hover in red, glowing letters above every human's head. And, so he read this human's name_: Light Yagami_.

He looked at the familiar sequence of numbers that represented the human's remaining time on earth. His lifespan had shortened once he decided to pick up the Death Note from the grass outside his school, where Ryuk had serendipitously dropped it. But, this was so in every past case where a human had picked up a Death Note. No, what _really_ interested the Shinigami King was the fact that the human's lifespan had not been reduced as much as his predecessors. Usually, these humans' lifespans shortened to a month or less, but not this one. Not a bit.

It made the Shinigami King nervous. And, the Shinigami King did not like being nervous. Probably less than he liked being fooled.

This human, like Ryuk, was different. This human could change everything. This human could _reveal_ everything.

And, with a grumble, he realized that he would have to do something about it.

He impatiently waved a three-clawed hand over his portal. The portal moved over cities, across the Pacific Ocean, across deserts and forests, highways and sleepy towns until it came to a stop on a haphazardly laid out city on the eastern coast of the United States. Boston, for all its bustling with the Friday night sounds of somewhat drunken patrons, eagerly unwinding down from the week, seems almost engulfed by the darkness of the Atlantic Ocean. Like a small patch of stars in the ever greater expanse of the night sky.

He tapped the portal, zooming in on a single-bedroom apartment, much like a human might tap to zoom in on a picture on his or her IPhone screen.

A young woman stood in front of her bathroom vanity mirror as she lifted one up one of her eyelids in order to more easily don a contact lens. _Disgusting_, he thought_,_ _I don't understand how humans can walk around with plastic stuck to their eyeballs. _

He then squinted, making sure he was reading her name above her head correctly. _Akira Yagami_. She looked similar to her younger brother, the same wavy honey brown hair and doe brown eyes. However, unlike how his eyes seemed to perpetually express cool intelligence and arrogance, hers were ones of smiles and wry humor, ready to crinkle at the corners in a laugh.

The Shinigami King grinned. _Akira_.

Ironic. Now that is something the king _did_ like being.


	2. The Way Skin Gives

**November 27, 2003**

_**Four days after Light Yagami picked up the Death Note**_

Akira thrust her fork into one of the potatoes in the boiling water. The skin of the potato gave as the prongs easily slipped into the starchy root. Removing the fork, she turned off her stove and began to strain the water out of the pot. Supposedly, mashed potatoes were one of the easier Thanksgiving dishes to make, which is why she volunteered for it, but she regretted her choice now.

It was _too_ easy, too easy to serve as an adequate distraction from the dulling pain still left from the bruises. Too quiet to drown out the occasional noise of a toppling object or an opened drawer or door. Too mundane to keep her own mind off of the terrible dreams that have been plaguing her for the past few nights.

Death. So much death. A woman her age, who she had never met before, breathing her last breath in a antiseptic hospital bed, her body all but a skeleton and her hair shaved. A plump bar patron struggling to breathe as his blood vessel clots near his heart. A shot. A shot in the head, sudden and impersonal, right in between the shoulder blades of an enemy soldier, in an acrid and dusty trench in Afghanistan. Then, Vietnam. Then, America. Soldiers bearing down on their enemies upon horses, brandishing their swords and battle standards. But, once their horses' hooves began to trample over the bodies and the blood began to plaster their glorious military uniforms, the glory of war became something else. _I_ _don't want to die_. She felt that panic, that fear, in all of them. She was in all of them, and she drank it. She drank their deaths as if they were mouthfuls of cold mountain spring water on a hot day.

_Clack_.

Akira immediately snapped back to the present and she could feel her own color leaving her face. Leaving the boiled potatoes in their strainer, she picked up her chef's knife and walked back to her living room, where the noise had come from. Her bloodshot eyes peeked around the corner, but, as with all the other noises, there was no one there. Nothing to indicate that someone _had_ been there.

Except for the open drawer to her media cabinet of course. This was milder telekinesis though compared to the past few days. Almost deceptively mild, as if something were leading her into a false sense of security. Either that or toying with her.

When the dreams and the noises began, Akira had had the energy to be angry the offending animate objects, stalk over to them in turn, and set them back to their proper places. However, the objects' almost maniacal dance soon became too erratic and too numerous for her to set back to right. She would put back one book and ten more books would topple out of her bookcase. She would close one door, and all the others would begin to open and close, and open and close, like the wings of trapped butterflies.

At night, she would wake up to something unseen dragging her wrist or her ankle towards her bed. When she opted to sleep at the library or at a friend's house, the _presence_ would follow her. It would be something small to tip her off that _it_ was there. A beautiful ceramic mug shattering on the floor. A fluorescent light flickering off and then on. Something small to let her know that it was still there, to ler know that it would drag everyone around her into nightmares and bruised wrists and ankles if she didn't go back home and _dream._

She didn't understand the point of the dreams, but she _did_ understand that whatever entity was currently riding piggy back to her life wanted her to have them.

She never questioned it at all, actually, nor did she even speak to it. From what she did read about spirits and from what she did glean from horror movies, it was beast to not give the ghouls any encouragement. But, once her fear became familiar and took up its residence in that place right below her ribcage as a constant hum, like an alien heartbeat, exhaustion had set in. Enough exhaustion to extinguish her anger like a cold bucket of water on a drunken fool.

_Lucky for me_, she thought wryly, _I'm in America and subject to its bank holidays_. God, if she had had work that day, she would not have been able to prevent herself from falling asleep right on her keyboard and drooling all over it.

_Poltergeist_. _Demon_. _Ghost_. _Maybe I should actually call up a priest or Ghost Hunters or that self-deprecating lead actor from Paranormal State._

She approached the drawer of the media cabinet cautiously, still brandishing her knife. Then, she took a deep breath. Whatever the _thing_ was, she was tired. She was tired of all of it and ready for some answers even if the _thing_ was simply a product of her own schizophrenic delusions. Although, she could not logically conclude that. Her friends and coworkers and even passing strangers had noticed the flickering lights and inanimate objects suddenly becoming animate. They had only seen the tamer torments of the _presence_ and were not haunted by the same dreams of death, but they had noticed.

And, that was enough to convince her that at least whatever was going on was not a _complete_ delusion.

Akira put down the knife and held up her hands.

"Okay. I'm ready. What do you want?"

She didn't realize she had been expecting an answer until she heard one.

_**Your help.**_

The voice resonated from within her own mind and brought with it a multitude of sensations. The close, stale air of her grandmother's attic when she pushed open its trapdoor that had been sealed for over a decade. The smell of her college roommate's compost pile in their backyard. The coarseness of sand as she brushed it off of a smooth boulder underneath her hands when she explored a dry cave in Arizona. Wisps of burning sandalwood incense. The most quiet of quiet that can only come from the deepest sleep.

And, that last image filled her with a most acute longing.

"And...what exactly, do you need help with?"

There was a beat, a seemingly small intake of breath, and then something in her media cabinet began to rummage on its own. Suddenly, a photo album zipped out of the open drawer, hit the wall with a smack of leather upon plaster, and fell open. Tentatively, Akira walked up to the book and picked it up.

_Light?_

The page proudly sported a picture of her brother and herself when they were kids. It was of their first trip to Space Land, a local space-themed game park. They were grinning triumphantly, decked out in all black and holding up their lazer tag guns in a kind of victory pose beneath a high score board. Well, she was posing-Light was standing stoically as usual.

_**He is in danger**_.

This body was surprisingly easy to manipulate. He preferred female bodies when it came to wearing a human's skin. They perhaps weren't as physically strong as their male counterparts, but females tended to have a more open connection to their feelings and subconscious. The difference was equivalent to the difference between driving on the highway opposite and parallel to rush hour traffic.

Not that the Shinigami King had much experience with driving himself. Although, perhaps this time around would provide him with a chance to remedy that.

Like her brother, there was something _different_ about this human. Usually, when he took control over a body, it took a few seconds for the body to respond to his will. Much like waiting for an ancient computer to load. But, if all the other bodies were 90s, clunky pieces of junk, Akira was a sleek modern computer. Her body responded instantaneously, as if it had spent its whole life waiting for him.

He glanced at the chef's knife, so carefully placed on the nearby dining room table. As if, when Akira had been awake, she had _anticipated_ his will. Swiftly, gracefully, he walked over to the gleaming blade. Akira's eyes, instead of their warm brown, were red, the color of blood, the color of roses, the color of death, the color of love.

_Love_. Humans were _so_ predictable.

He picked up the knife with a flourish and tested the edge on her finger tip. It drew blood easily. The Shinigami King felt no pain, but he knew he would have to be quick lest he wake up his own new pet.

"Oh, one more thing."

He rather liked the sound of this human's voice. It was deep and cheeky...when she wasn't exhausted and scared out of her wits, that is. The Shinigami King located Akira's phone and texted a quick message to her father:

"Dad Im hurt please send help"

He then went into the kitchen, still holding the knife, and looked at the potatoes, still damp in the strainer. The vegetables were still warm although the Shinigami King no longer saw steam rise from them. He dug the tip of the knife into one of the potatoes, scooped out a bit of the golden starch, and popped it in his mouth.

Oh, such rapture. The best part about riding with a human was the food, he decided. He savored the warm piece of potato, chewing it slowly and appreciatively as it melted on his tongue. It would be better with butter, but he didn't think he had time for that. He pushed up both sleeves of her sweater, revealing the bruises on his wrist and held up his forearm to the light, right over the batch of boiled potatoes.

How smooth and perfect the skin was.

And how easily it gave underneath the knife.


End file.
